Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the focus on individual practices around water, sanitation and hygiene of a global health research project that makes evidence on AMR. This focus allows the collaboration to disregard the web of historically grown factors that contribute to contamination of which AMR is one.

Paper long abstract:

Unclean water causes illness and disease, and access to clean water has long been a proclaimed goal of global health. Yet, within global health there is strong focus on interventions targeting the practices and behaviours of individuals instead of the infrastructures that could bring them clean water. In this paper, I attend to the case of one global health research collaboration, here called D-Lab, to shed light on this focus on individual behaviour in contexts of contamination. D-Lab investigates residents’ practices around Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WaSH) in their quest to find out what drives the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR is known to relate to its ecological environment, where bacteria are responding to e.g. metals and other residues in soil and water. Through my ethnographic engagement with D-Lab’s researchers as well as with water and sanitation specialists who work in the region, I draw out a space that is subject to registers of contamination, through a historically grown web of ecological, social, economic, and regulatory factors. By investigating the practices of individuals, e.g. whether or not they are washing their hands before preparing food, D-Lab shifts the focus away from the context in which the residents’ behaviours occur. In so doing, the project, and the wider global health community, stabilises not only frameworks of inquiry, but also the very landscape including its physical infrastructures and biological compositions from which contaminated water emerges.